Microsoft's SQL Server 2014 has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available on April 1.

Microsoft described SQL Server 2014 as an important component of Microsoft’s overall cloud-first data platform. The platform promises to deliver breakthrough performance, accelerated insights through tools everyone uses and the ability to scale globally on-premises and in the cloud.

Microsoft's customers will be able to add SQL Server 2014 in a Window Azure Virtual Machine as an additional secondary to thier AlwaysOn solution.

Backup to Windows Azure enables users to configure backups, which are compressed and encrypted, directly to Azure for greater data protection, taking advantage of Microsoft’s global datacenter. Windows Azure storage offers geographic redundancy at a lower cost than maintaining additional hardware. Beyond SQL Server 2014, this technology will also be generally available as a standalone tool, SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool, on April 1 supporting prior versions of SQL Server.

SQL Server 2014 also features enhanced In-Memory ColumnStore for data warehousing. First delivered with SQL Server 2012, the In-Memory Columnstore is now updatable with as much as 5x data compression for more real-time analytics support.

The new platform also supports buffer pool extension to non-volatile memory such as solid state drives (SSDs) for faster paging.